AI Weirdness: the strange side of machine learning

Tag: grad school

Total 24 Posts
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Light in a circular cavity makes a variety of standing wave patterns, some of which look like flowers, wagon wheels, or even tie-fighter spaceships. These images are from my simulations of the light in the cavities of nanolasers - each pattern is called a mode, and the smaller the laser,

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<a href="https://aiweirdness.com/" style="text-decoration:underline;">lewisandquark</a>: Someone recently asked me if there were other grad students/scientists blogging pictures from their daily life in the lab. I realized that I only know of a couple scientist bloggers who
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The microscopic fractured edge of a piece of semiconductor looms like an enormous cliff face.  However, this entire view would fit easily inside the diameter of a single human hair.  At the top of the cliff is a rough dark layer, the remains of a protective layer that we bombarded
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Someone asked me yesterday how big my samples are, and what it all looks like.  This is a zoomed-out view (only 90x!) showing a nearly edge-on view of one of my samples, sitting on a cratered sea of carbon tape. It’s so zoomed-out that I almost feel embarrassed asking
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I posted a picture of the jagged broken edge of my sample the other day.  Now here’s the same spot under the electron microscope.  This view’s looking from the side, so you see all the detail of the dark edge where the silicon snapped. This far zoomed out,
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Islands! Actually, it’s Newton’s Rings again, a rainbow effect caused when white light shines on really thin films of transparent stuff.  In this case, I don’t know what the transparent stuff is.  The material beneath is semiconductor laser material.  I was trying to clean it with alcohol,
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Welcome to Mount Gloop. I don’t know what this mountain is made of - like most of the naturalistic landforms I discover, it’s not supposed to be there.  It’s probably some sort of residue or gunk.  It rises out of a plane of semiconductor laser material.  Those
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Colorful flames and smoke? This is actually Newton’s Rings again, a colorful microscopic pattern that appeared on my sample of laser material after some isopropyl alcohol dried funny.  It must have left a thin film of something behind, and that produced rainbow patterns in the same way a thin
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It’s too bad that whenever I get interesting images, it’s usually a sign that something’s gone wrong. In this case, the rainbow rings means that there’s some junk left on my sample - this is residue left behind from IPA (now, that’s isopropyl alcohol, not
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Hand + cold water = fun with thermal camera Here’s another picture from when I was “testing out the thermal camera”.  I think I’ve well-established now that the thermal camera works, and that I’ve figured out how to capture video from it.  Now I’m just… getting even more
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